


Champagne and Memories

by fannishliss



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-30
Updated: 2015-12-30
Packaged: 2018-05-10 09:43:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5580877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fannishliss/pseuds/fannishliss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three resents the Time Lords for wiping the memories of Jamie and Zoe, and he takes measures to prevent that from happening to Jo.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Champagne and Memories

**Author's Note:**

> If you're not familiar with Jo, she is great!  Look up [Jo Grant](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo_Grant) on wikipedia to start with.

**title: Champagne and Memories**  
author: [](http://fannishliss.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://fannishliss.livejournal.com/)**fannishliss**  
length: 2500 words  
genre: Angst, romance  
pairing: third Doctor/Jo Grant  
rating: R

Summary: Three resents the Time Lords for wiping the memories of Jamie and Zoe, and he takes measures to prevent that from happening to Jo.

This story is written for the [who@50 fanworkathon-athon:](http://who-at-50.livejournal.com/) the month of September focusing on the Third Doctor.   This story has been proofread by my good husband, but not britpicked or beta'd for canon compliance -- some Notes are at the end.  If you have any questions I'll do my best to answer you!  All comments eagerly craved.

=====

"Can you hear it, Jo?" the Doctor asked, his deep voice whisper soft.

His companion relaxed back into his embrace, the fingers of his right hand light at her temples.  Eyes closed, her face was relaxed in a blissful smile.

"Yes!  It's beautiful, Doctor!  It sounds like ... windchimes, and angels singing!"

"Angels?  Hardly, my dear.  If you ever hear this sound in your head, it will mean one of my people is attempting to question you."

"Except—" Jo objected.

"Yes, except when it is only me that you are hearing," the Doctor allowed.

"But I want to remember this — it's so beautiful!" Jo said, yearning clear in her voice.

"You will, my dear, if I have anything to say about it," —this time, the Doctor bitterly added to himself.

"How will this work again?" Jo asked, trustingly.

The Doctor had really appreciated working with Liz Shaw, whose mind, for a human, was like a steel trap. He'd had little use for the idea of a mere "assistant" to hand him things and tell him how clever he was.  (He had to admit, it stung more than a little, that Liz had left with such a harsh opinion of him.)

Jo Grant had done nothing but surprise him.  She was no genius, but she was observant, clever, daring and brave, and she put the Doctor first in absolutely everything.

He ought to feel worse about all this.  He ought to feel like the deviant his people believed him to be, consorting as he did with members of a lesser species. Instead, the Doctor burned with indignation at the thought of how the Time Lords had treated Jamie and Zoe, mercilessly wiping their memories of him, and then exiling him to Earth to learn, by living amongst them, how backward and benighted Humans really were.

His young human companions had done nothing wrong, and the Doctor seethed with anger at the violation their minds had undergone.  The Doctor had to acknowledge that his anger was not unalloyed with grief at losing the love of his sweet young friends.

Jamie's affection had been so pure, sweet and good.  The young Scot loved freely, openly, with no hint of baseness and no concept of perversion.  Taking the Doctor roughly under his arm as they strode down a lane or across a field, embracing him in a moment of joy or relief— the Doctor had been shocked at first, but not as scandalized as his people would have been.  After living with Jamie for a while, he'd come to take comfort in the young man's rough caresses, and treasured the moments when Jamie had tousled his hair or pressed gentle kisses to his cheek for simple comfort, relief or joy.

Zoe, too, had come from an enlightened time in Earth's history. Very young and new to adulthood, she was unburdened by shame or false modesty. After coming on board the Tardis, she'd quickly assessed the level of intimacy between the Doctor and Jamie, and taken that level for standard. Those had been sweet days indeed.  His personality in that incarnation had tended towards nervousness and worry, but Jamie and Zoe had made him so happy, that he would gladly have accepted every second of anxiety for the moments of camaraderie with his dear companions.

And now, here he was again, with Jo, but this time, he was going in with his eyes open, and he was taking precautions, and damn the Time Lords if they thought he would leave them with any ammunition to use against him.

He'd warned Jo that the Time Lords might try to interrogate her.

"Let them do their worst, Doctor," she'd said, tossing her head and lifting her chin proudly. "I've taken the anti-interrogation training.  They won't break me!"

"It's not a question of breaking you, Jo," the Doctor had warned her.  His own people made him feel shame he couldn't imagine any of his companions inspiring.  "They will simply rifle though your thoughts telepathically until they've got what they want."

Jo's eyes widened a bit.  "Would it — would it hurt?"

The Doctor shook his head.  "No.  But they might take away your memories of — of your friendship with me.  They've done it before."

"Bastards!" Jo exclaimed.

The Doctor lifted his eyebrows at the girl.

"They exiled you here, but if you make friends, they'll take them away? Does that make any sense at all?"

The Doctor shook his head grimly.  "It doesn't have to make sense to you, Jo, or even to me.  They regard themselves, Time Lord society, as the ultimate civilized people in the universe.  They believe that even to walk amongst 'lesser species' is a waste of time, or worse.  To be close to a non-Time Lord is anathema to them — even on Gallifrey itself, where aliens are only allowed on the planet as servants." -- Slaves, if he were honest.

"Hmph," Jo dismissed.  "I can't say I think much of your people then, Doctor, if they're anything like you describe.  How'd you get to be so different?"

The Doctor shrugged off her question — it was the same old question he'd never been able to answer — and he turned his mind to the matter at hand — Jo Grant, the beautiful young human currently baring her mind and body to him, happily and with complete trust in his good intentions.

He wanted to have taken Jo to a beautiful planet — some balmy tropical night, with wild astronomical events transforming the sky into something sublime— but he couldn't trust the Tardis, hobbled as she was.  His own Tardis!  Rage bubbled up again and he ruthlessly stamped it back down.  Even full access to her infinite suites had been denied him by the Time Lords with their smug ideas of punishment.  It took him up to a full hour to meditate his way through the static in order to convey to the Tardis the suite he'd like to show Jo.

But at last, he'd managed it.  Apparently the gardens were more deeply encrypted — they would have been his first choice — but at least the Prydon guest room was available.  He led her there and she was suitably impressed by the ornate organic lines of the white wood furniture, the sumptuous richness of the crimson and gold Prydonian hangings, carpets and bedclothes.

She threw herself onto the wide bed, laughing with glee.

"Look at this room, Doctor! It's like a seraglio!"

"It is not," he replied tartly. "Nothing like.  I don't see a dozen simpering handmaidens anywhere — do you?"

"No," she smiled. "That's a good point.  That would be quite eleven too many."

She met his eyes and held them.  In her gaze was fondness, respect, lust and delight — what beautiful creatures these Humans were.  Why couldn't he make them see?  Why did they refuse to understand?? Cold, ancient, dusty, arrogant —!

"Doctor," Jo said, "come here."

And so he found himself sitting propped up against the headboard of an enormous, luxurious bed, Jo Grant in deshabille on his lap, tickling her thoughts with the barest traces of Old High Gallifreyan.

"This is the plan, Jo," the Doctor whispered, directly into her mind.  "The human brain categorizes memory in several ways— short term and long term being the most basic of course.   You may wish to think of what I'm doing as a form of hypnosis."

"Ooh!  Exciting!" Jo cried. "Can you increase my ability to remember things perfectly?   Or, give me new skills I haven't learned yet?"

The Doctor chuckled.  "Perhaps.  But I'm most concerned with hiding memories we don't want the Time Lords to know about.  Long-term memories are physically encoded in the brain, while short term memories remain more at a chemical level.  What I'm going to do is loop your short-term retrieval system so that your taboo memories remain accessible to you from the short-term, instead of being physically encoded."

"Won't my short term memory fill up, like a reel of magnetic tape?" Jo asked.

"No — more like snapshots, slipped between the pages of books," the Doctor said.  It was more of a colorful lie than an oversimplification, but he couldn't begin to explain the process using the primitive scientific terms of Jo's era.

"Hmm," Jo said, nodding.  "You can't really explain it to me, can you."

"No," the Doctor smiled, tapping her fondly on the nose.

"Well, as long as I can remember, and you're safe, then I don't care what you do," she said.

"But I do have to leave a failsafe — a trigger that will cause a cascade collapse of these forbidden memories."

"I'm sorry about that," Jo frowned.  "I hate that word, 'forbidden.' It's hateful.  So dark ages."

The Gallifreyan Dark Ages had been a redolent stew of paradisiacal perfection and utter misery.  Rassilon's revolution had sacrificed that fragile Elysium for a broader, more stable, general well-being.  Much was sacrificed, but much had been improved.

"You and I will set our own rules, Jo — no one else," the Doctor promised.

Jo laughed again; her musical carefree laughter delighted him so. "I'm so glad I flirted with that obnoxious prince, Doctor!" Jo exclaimed.

"Really, my dear!  How can you be glad, when you freely admit you recognize how obnoxious he was!"

"Sometimes," Jo said, shifting a little to relax more deeply into his arms, "it's good to flirt with men, without any intention of following through.  He thought he could have whatever he wanted — me even!— at his whim!  We showed him a thing or two."

The Doctor privately feared that Jo's indomitable spirit might sometime get her into a situation that was over her head.  But somehow, so far, together they'd managed to escape every peril.

"I don't want you flirting with dangerous men, Jo!" the Doctor  reprimanded her lightly.

"I'm right where I want to be now, aren't I?" Jo laughed, fluttering her eyelashes at him.

The Doctor gave up and laughed along with her.  What a row they'd had!

"How's a girl supposed to deal with her, ooh, natural urges, if you won't let me out of your sight!" Jo had screamed, after the bad prince fiasco.  The Doctor had fractured one of the man's toes in a blatant stomp that he blamed on tripping.

"Natural urges?" the Doctor had countered, with scorn.

"What? Time Lords don't have urges?"

"No!" he'd denied.

"I don't believe you!" Jo had shouted, and began to strip off her clothes right there in the control room.

The Doctor had known he was lost when he rushed to throw the lock on the door instead of averting his eyes and draping her with his coat.

In truth, most Time Lords easily conquered what dim and weakened urges remained to them — but perhaps it was because he spent so much time amongst Humans, or perhaps because he had lived in the Back Time, or maybe, it was something to do with his mysterious origins, but the Doctor knew all too well the natural urges that Jo was trying to invoke in him — and succeeding.

She'd torn off her loose minidress and brief undergarments in less time than it had taken him to cross the room and secure the door.  She stood there now like some sort of Diana in her tall skyblue riding boots and nothing else, fists on her hips, flashing brown eyes daring him not to want her.

He wanted her.  How could he not?

Nothing had prepared him for Jo Grant.  Liz had been so rational, such a solid companion.  Jamie and Zoe, their love had been so simple, so innocent — nothing like this.  Barbara and Ian — of course they'd only had eyes for each other.  He could only think back haplessly to the hazy memories of Susan's grandmother in the Back Time — memories that he could barely access through the haze of the Matrix's lock on that era.  Or even further, back to the other renegades he'd known in school — the Master — his strange, greedy obsession with the Doctor, even then, before their friendship had been broken, the Doctor had no idea what Koschei had really wanted from him — or what exactly he'd hoped from his old former friend in return. Had it been this? Lying, skin to skin, thought to thought?  Surely not.  Even then, Koschei had hidden his body and his thoughts in thick ceremonial garb, high collars, heavy gloves. Whatever the Master truly wanted from him, it was nothing like this simple, open sharing, this sweet giving of pleasure.

"There," the Doctor said, implanting the final suggestion in Jo's mind.

"Hm," she said, shaking her head a bit.  "I can't tell the difference."

"You shouldn't be able to — it wouldn't be a very good failsafe if you could feel it there, bothering you."

"I'm sorry, Doctor," Jo said suddenly.

"Why?" the Doctor answered. "Second thoughts?"

"I'm not ashamed of you — of this.  To the contrary!  I like you so much, and I'm so proud that you like me back.  It's just sad, that your people think it's wrong."

"It is sad, Jo.  But let's not be sad.  Let's be happy, just to spite them!"

"Great idea!" Jo laughed.

And they were happy, so happy...

The Doctor remembered, champagne in his hand, all the sweetness he and Jo had found.

He remembered their stolen times in the Prydon room, Jo in her favorite diaphanous peignoir, like a drifting cloud in a beautiful dream.  She liked the drama of it, wearing a veil that he would delicately stir aside, until his cool hands reached her hot skin, his caresses lifting her higher and higher into blisses she'd never even dreamed were possible.

He held back, of course, refusing to disrobe, only telling her the truth — he couldn't.   He couldn't risk the possibility of a bond, not even a hint of one.  The failsafe in her memory was no match for the strength of a Gallifreyan bond  — and she was so lovely, so open to him, so absolutely willing that he had to keep his bondsense mercilessly in check.  He felt her there, so eager for him, and he couldn't deny how much he wanted her.  But if he were to bond, and they took her away, he couldn't imagine what he might do, what he might become.  So he held back.  He kept himself in check.  He gave himself the gift of her pleasure, the music of her cries, the symphony of her breath,  the banquet of her body.

Jo Grant, smiling, happy, sweet and open, legs spread wide as he lapped at her core, the heat of her, the hot Human scent of her sex, the sweat of her on his hands as he held her to him, the twinging pain inside him as he denied himself, feeling her orgasms fluttering and clenching around his long, clever fingers.

And now this.

The Master, delving into Jo's mind, had triggered the failsafe. All those beautiful memories were lost to her in an instant, and she faded from lover to pal in a single human heartbeat.

This haughty young scientist was carrying her away with him — taking her to the Amazon, for adventure!

Her smiles, her laughter, dimmed across the room as she turned away from him.

The Doctor downed his champagne, and lived on.  


**Author's Note:**

> Notes: If you're not familiar with Jo, she is great! Look up [Jo Grant](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo_Grant) on wikipedia to start with.  
>  Also note, I've taken liberties with chronology here, as Jo meets the Master and is hypnotised by him much later rather than right away (in Terror of the Autons). The young scientist whom Jo marries is Cliff Jones, whom she meets in her last episode, the Green Death. [See Jo and the Doctor bid farewell on youtube](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veI1_9rulGY). I usually do stick with canon chronology, but the Master's attempts to mess with Jo needed to be later for the purposes of my story.


End file.
